New Year's Eve Eve 2017

I just got through doing something that I hadn't done in ages, and it came about in the oddest way.

Today, to prevent ourselves from sitting on our butts watching television all day, The Husband and I hooked up with his sister and brother-in-law, and did a road trip to an antique mall about 2 hours away.  This mall is HUGE - aisle after aisle of vender booths with everything under the sun.  We wandered the aisles for nearly five hours, looking for a few specific items - a print, a table, a Tupperware salt shaker.  He worked one side of each aisle, and I worked the other.  We'd hold up stuff - "Hey, look at this. . . ."  We found stuff we hadn't even known we needed.  ;)

Anyway, at some point, we were in opposite booths with our backs to one another, and he said something - I'm not even sure what it was (because he mumbles, and our backs were to one another) - that made me suddenly think about a bowl of ice cream with Coke poured over it.

I NEVER THINK ABOUT ICE CREAM.  I just don't.  I mean, if there's ice cream on a TV commercial, then I might think about it.  Or if I see somebody working with great enjoyment on a double-dip cone on a hot day, I might think I'd like to have one and might even go get one.  But ice cream just isn't regularly at the top of my list, or The Husband's, either.  I buy it, sometimes, and we might eat one bowl apiece, right away, then we keep it long enough for it to get freezer burnt then we wash it down the drain.  It's not my go-to treat.

Pouring Coke over ice cream was something my parents did when I was a kid.  We didn't call it an "ice cream float."  We ate it with a spoon, then drank the milky liquid.  I always thought it was kind of weird, though in a good way.  I have not done it - or thought about doing it - in probably 40 years.

I said to The Husband, "I don't know what you just said, but whatever it was, it made me think about a bowl of ice cream with Coke poured over it."  And he gave me the "Huh?" look, having apparently   not mentioned ice cream. 

It may be that the antique mall was playing music with subliminal messages (though it would seem that they'd want me to think, "Antique table," not "ice cream with Coke poured over it").  It may be that, come 5 p.m., when the place was closing and we had not eaten anything since breakfast, a drop in blood sugar might have been giving me subtle hints.  In any case, the thought sunk into my brain and would not go away.

On the way home, I happily remembered that we have ice cream in the freezer, left over from Christmas Eve, so probably not too frosty yet.  And there was a 2-liter bottle of Coke on the counter, also left over from Christmas Eve.  I thought I was set!  As soon as we got home, I fixed a little bowl of ice cream and tested the Coke for fizz.  Nada.  I got nothing but swirly syrup.  This would not do; there's got to be fizz.  I kept searching the kitchen.  In the pantry was a small bottle of Coke left over from a road trip we took two months ago.  Evidently, someone had taken one swallow and put the top back on; it was flat, too.  We had some cans of diet Coke left over from Christmas Eve, and I was forced to use one of them, for there must be fizz in a bowl of ice cream with Coke poured over it.

I ate the foam, I ate the ice cream, I drank the creamy Coke down to the last drop.  And boy, even with diet Coke, it sure was good.

From my toasty warm office - 12/27/17

It appears that the cold weather has driven me into the house for the next few weeks.  The low temperature tonight is supposed to be in the teens, with highs in the 30s for the next week or so.  Bummer!

Christmas has come and gone, and it was a good one.  Both The Husband and I were off work on the 26th, and we spent the day hunkered down in the house, eating left-overs from our Christmas Eve gathering.  I got out of bed at 6 a.m., had some coffee, then slept on the couch from 7 a.m. until 9 a.m., slept in the recliner from 11 a.m. until 2 p.m., and had the audacity to head to bed at 10 p.m. and sleep until 7 this morning. 

But I've been cracking the whip on myself today (in a figurative sense, of course - I am not into pain).  As Christmas approached, several of my embroidery design customers asked for special orders, and I put them all off until this week.  Now it's time to get busy!  The embroidery machine has been running for two hours, already, testing designs I worked on this morning. 

There's just never enough time in any day to do everything I want/need to do.  I still have gifts to embroider for folks I didn't see at Christmas.  I want to paint a picture for our bedroom.  I want to make a swaggy thing to go over our bed (but need to go to the craft store for supplies).  I want to build a table for my sewing room.  I want to rearrange my yard (which ain't happening in THIS kind of weather!).  I want to practice on my mandolin, and figure out how to get Alexa to do what I *#)!@ ask her to do.

And yet I sit here blogging . . . .

From the Back Porch - 11/14/2017

What a difference a few days has made in the colors around here!  Frost has bitten the tender things.  Our yard is carpeted with leaves.  No more complaining about not having anything to go in the composter!  I just hope that these moderate temperatures linger for a while.  I dread being run in the house by cold weather.

 I have been wanting to try my hand at wood carving.  Sunday, I selected a stick of wood from the log pile and lugged it to the patio.  I could not find a chisel in any of the places where a chisel ought to be, so yesterday I stopped by a hardware store and bought several, in sizes ranging from fairly small to fairly beefy.  When I came home, I began hacking on the log, thinking I might whittle myself a wooden rabbit.

Wood carving is hard.

I discovered that my log has a crack in it, which probably goes all the way through and will ruin my rabbit, but I kept hammering away.  For two hours or more, I chiseled.  So far, it looks like I've sculpted a butt crack peeking out from torn pants, but that was a natural feature of the log.  Heh.  I should leave it that way and carve a rabbit out of another log.  ;)

Anyway, as I was saying, I hacked and chiseled and hammered for about two hours, sitting straddle of a concrete bench.  The next thing I knew, the sun was going down and I was cold.  When I put my tools down and stood up . . . Lord have mercy!  I could barely move!  And about an hour later, my shoulder started aching, and it seemed like there was sand in the joint.  I'd pounded my left hand with the hammer a couple of times, and it was swollen and blue.  

But, dang, the chiseling was fun.

From the back porch - 10/20/2017

It is finally feeling like fall around here, though we don't have much color yet. 

I am enjoying the mums that I bought from the local FFA boys.  They were a little battered in transit, but I planted them, anyway, and they are lovely (if a little one-sided).

The lettuce in the raised beds is coming along.  We have enough young leaves for a salad.  I planted spinach, too, but it's still tiny.  Pretty soon, I'll need to construct some sort of cover for those beds to keep the frost off the plants.

I think I told you about the elephant ears that my sister gave me, the ones I never planted.  Just laid them on the ground near the spot where I intended to plant them, but never got around to it.  They laid there on top of the ground all winter last year, and all this year, and when I discovered them on my first trip around the yard this spring, I figured they were goners.  But not only did they survive and produce leaves, they actually bloomed.  Not one bloom, but SIX.  I've never had an elephant ear produce more than one bloom, even when planted in the ground!

Five spent blooms, one emerging bloom.

I still haven't prepared the vegetable garden for next year.  A couple of weeks ago, we cleaned up the old plants, removed the tomato cages, etc., and I scattered 200 pounds of pelletized lime on the soil.  As I will trying to work it into the soil, the tiller tire came off the rim.  We took the tire off, and I took it to a gas station to be repaired, and by the time we attempted to put it back on the tiller, it was flat again.  I don't know what I'm going to do about this.  I tried to find a solid rubber tire that wouldn't go flat, but they apparently don't exist.  The guy at the hardware store said to put a tube in the old tire.  Can that even be done?

Gloria the Second - September 28, 2017

A couple of weeks ago, I ordered 10 pots of yellow chrysanthemums from the local FFA boys.  They should arrive some time this week.

I knew when I ordered them where I was going to plant them - five in each flower bed on the sides of the porch.  Those flower beds were a mess, full of iris and daylilies and monkey grass that are long over-due for dividing.  The plan was to dig all that stuff up, divide it all, and re-plant it where it made better sense, leaving room for the incoming mums. 

I had the day off yesterday, and it was warm and sunny.  By 9 a.m., I was outside, digging up the plants with a shovel.  When I finished digging everything up, I went down to the garden shed to get Gloria, the little red tiller, who needed a little work.  Her cord was hanging halfway out and wouldn't go back in.  I had ordered a new crank mechanism, and we'd have to put that on before I could till up the soil.  As my luck would have it, the part didn't fit.  Plan B was to start Gloria with a drill (she has a belly button that receives a chuck thing).

Plan B didn't work, either.  I drilled and drilled, but the thing wouldn't start.  The Husband said to check the oil.  I did.  It looked low.  Back to the garden shed for a quart of oil.  The Husband said the manual said to fill it up, so I did.  When I tried to crank it with the drill again, Gloria belched, and a stream of oil shot out of the air filter.  Simultaneously, The Husband and I said, "Oooo, that didn't sound good."

I went to the store and bought Gloria the Second.  While waiting for the cashier to ring up the sale, another cashier checked the records.  Gloria the First had a two-year warranty.  I had bought her in April 2015, so she was five months past her warranty.  My luck holds out again, eh?

I may re-name her, just so she won't quit as soon as her warranty expires.

Anyway, the beds are both re-planted and awaiting the arrival of the mums.

From the back porch - September 18, 2017

My favorite component in this year's view from the back porch is the Elephant Ears.  My sister gave them to me last spring, two bulbs - one large, one small - that I stashed in the "trunk" of my Wrangler.  I open that trunk about twice a year; there's normally nothing in it but a 10-disc CD changer and a ratchet strap, neither of which I need on a regular basis.  So it was that those bulbs rode around, forgotten, in my trunk until the fall, when I discovered mouse poop in the front passenger seat and had to tear the Jeep apart to dispatch the offender and its leavings.  It was when I went to set a baited trap in the trunk that I found the bulbs, and I thought, "Oh, sh*t, I bet they're dead," but decided to plant them, anyway, in case there was still a living cell or two in them.  I brought them around to the back of the house and laid them near the spot where I intended to plant them.  And that's as far as I got.  They laid there all winter on top of the ground and STILL haven't been planted. Aren't they magnificent?

I cleaned out the two of the three raised beds on the left this weekend and planted lettuce seeds in the first one, which still holds the stump of the kale tree.  It looks pretty dead, but who knows?  It might sprout again.  The middle bed had zinnias in it.  They were leggy and unsightly, so I yanked them out.  All that remains is the freebie cabbage that a garden center gave me late this spring.  It currently has four leaves on it.  We'll see if it has any plans.  Beyond the middle bed is the Blue Apron bed. It contains the root ends of the scallions that go into the dinners, as well as several heads of garlic. (Blue Apron folks, if you're reading this, one head of garlic per shipment would suffice).  They grow! Some of the onions are as big as grocery store onions.  I probably should take those up before winter, eh?

Waaaay over to the left, the black thing is my compost tumbler.  I am making a serious effort at making compost to go in the vegetable garden, which is in bad need of additional dirt and apparently is starved of nutrients.  All of our food waste goes into the tumbler, but I had very little "brown" matter to add to it until I decided to shred the Blue Apron boxes and add them to the compost.  It seems to be working.  I hope it's ecologically OK to use the cardboard - things I've read say it's fine, though it apparently doesn't contain a lot of nutrients.  It sure gives bulk to the compost, and solves the problem of what to do with all that cardboard!

It's starting to rain now.  Maybe my lettuce seeds will sprout!

From the back porch - 9/6/17

Supper ingredients are prepped, and after we've eaten and cleaned up the dishes, I intend to have a one-woman Zelda-thon until nearly bedtime, if I wanna.  But I have a little time between now and when The Husband gets home.

It is an absolutely gorgeous evening here.  Temp is about 76 degrees.  It's sunny and still.  Birds chirping.  Crickets and frogs and various unknown things humming.  If  I didn't know that the northwest section of this country is on fire, and the southeast section is (or is about to be) under water, and some crazy guy on the other side of the world is playing with big guns, I might spend this pleasant evening less anxiously.

I might also be less anxious if The Husband had not killed a baby snake on the sidewalk yesterday evening.  Finding a baby snake is WAY WORSE than finding an adult snake.  He thought this one might've been a copperhead.  I'm hoping it wasn't.  I'm hoping it didn't have 10 or 12 siblings living under my porch.  They can't crawl up through cracks in the floor (we had the underside screened to keep mosquitoes out), but I bet they can get it around the screen doors.  If I find one on the porch, I'll be trapped in the house for the rest of my life.

The Husband sprinkled Snake Stopper all around the house.  It looks like it snowed here, and smells like Red Hots.

From the back porch - 8/29/17

The Husband made it to California just fine, thanks for asking.  I'll be glad when he gets home.

Meanwhile, I putter.

I was right irked with myself yesterday afternoon for goofing off the way I did, but I just could not get interested in anything.  I've done better today.  When I got home from work, I made myself sit down and get to work embroidering some towels I bought for a wedding gift.  My cousin's kid is the bride.  They invited me to a shower last weekend, but I was battling the devil at the time (it was a draw) and did not go.  Plus, I'd only learned of the shower a few days in advance, and I hadn't had time to do the towels.  I did them today.  Nothing fancy, just an initial with an oval border around it.  I hope she likes them.

Here it is, nearly the first of September, and I have not started on Christmas things for my craft booth.  Hadn't even given it much thought until I found a table topper I'd not finished last year.  I spent days blanket-stitching felt snowmen on this table topper, and then melted the embossed background fabric when I pressed it.  I wanted to cry.  After a bit of sniveling, I shoved it in a bag and forgot about it. This year, it doesn't look nearly so bad to me.  I think I can patch that melty spot with a snowflake.  ;)

From the back porch - August 28, 2017

Boy, sometimes, things sure don't turn out as we expected, eh?

This week, the boss lady was supposed to be on vacation, and since I try to take my vacation at the same time she takes hers, I was supposed to be on vacation, too.

All sorts of things cropped up.  First, The Husband scheduled a work-related seminar for the same week.  I knew about this months ago and had made other plans for my week off - or, rather, I'd come up with some ideas for things I might want to do this week.  I thought about going to Alabama to do some genealogy research.  I thought about staying home and working on improving the soil in the vegetable garden, or maybe sewing, or painting, or practicing the mandolin, or whatever my little heart might desire.

Then the boss lady's grandbaby got sick, then a hurricane came.  Her grandbaby is much better, thank you, but doesn't need to be back in nursery school just yet, and a babysitter is needed.  And it'll be raining all week at the beach where she was going.  Her trip is off, and so is my vacation.

But it's okay; I hadn't decided what to do, anyway, and I've scheduled another week off in October.  I can just take some "to-go" projects to work with me this week.  Last week, I found a big skein of pretty yarn, so today I started a shawl with it, the most ambitious knitting project I've ever attempted.  When I hunted up my traveling knitting bag this morning, I found a half-completed shawl in it, already.  Ooops.

It didn't take long to open the mail and return phone calls, so while the boss caught up on her reading, I knitted and watched mandolin videos.  About 2 p.m. today, she said, "Let's go home."  I seconded the motion, and now here I sit, listening to the wind picking up, waiting on the rain, and can't think of a blasted thing I really want to do.

The Husband left today to go to his seminar.  He was supposed to have a stop in Houston, but the hurricane changed that.  The airline re-routed him through Chicago; he won't get where he's going until 10 p.m., which will be midnight our time.  He'll be pooped.

I am glad I did not go with him on this trip.  ;)

First Bean Pickin' - August 21

I had a "Maytag Repairman" day at the office yesterday - nobody called, nobody visited.  I knew it was going to be that way, and so I took some things to work with me to occupy my time. 

Snapping green beans is a thing that you can let your hands do while your mind does something else that's not too taxing, like watching movies or engaging in stimulating conversations.  Since I didn't have anybody to talk to while I snapped, I watched YouTube videos - specifically, beginner mandolin videos.  (I told you I got a mandolin, didn't I?) 

First Canning - August 22

I had a "Maytag Repairman" sort of day at work yesterday - no one called, no one stopped by.  Knowing this would be the case, I took a big pan of green beans to snap.

Snapping beans is something that you can let your hands do while your mind does other things, like watch movies, or engage in conversation.  Since I didn't have anybody to talk to, I watched YouTube videos - specifically, beginner mandolin lessons.  (I told you I got a mandolin, didn't I?) 

I ended up with 14 pints of green beans, but getting there was a chore!  I hurried home from work to wash the beans and get them in the jars.  My jars were washed and ready, but as I was preparing to scald them and the lids, I realized that all of the jars had regular-sized mouths, and all of my lids were for wide-mouth jars.  By that time, I'd already started the beans to boil.  Had to turn off the burners and run to the store for lids.  Instead of dragging the big canner out of the attic, I decided to use the appliance I bought last year - a slow-cooker/pressure canner that sits on the countertop like a crock pot, which I'd never used for canning.  Couldn't find the right rack, had to improvise.  Couldn't get the lid on.  Couldn't get the timer set right and had to process the first batch TWICE to get the right amount of time.  Thankfully, the second batch was easier. 

And while all of this was going on, I was trying to cook supper, answer the phone, answer texts, etc.  It's a miracle I didn't blow up the kitchen.

Some of the water boiled out of the jars on the first batch.  The jars sealed, but I don't like the fact that some of the beans are now above the level of the liquid, so I will be giving those away today, with instructions to eat them right away and give me back my jars.  ;)

From the back porch - August 21, 2017

Happy solar eclipse day!

I live and work in an area outside of the totality path, but our eclipse was about 90%, and it was still very cool to witness. 

I promised Nanny that I would pick the green beans this afternoon after work.  I came home, put on my lounge pants, and smoothe forgot about picking beans.  About an hour ago, it hit me.  I put on some capri jeans and some loafers and went to the garden with my picking sacks.

Nanny was already in the garden, cutting okra, and as I was walking toward the bean rows, I was praying that I'd gotten there in time, that she hadn't picked them already.  But as I neared the rows, I was relieved to see clumps of beans still hanging on the vines.  I said "hey" and got to picking. 

Thirty seconds later, I felt my feet stinging and looked down to find them covered with red ants.  I'd been standing right on the ant hill!  Thankfully, they had not yet made their way up my legs, for I would have embarrassed myself, right there in front of Nanny, if I'd had ants in my pants.

We ended up with about 4 gallons of green beans and a gallon of okra.  I brought it all home.  Tomorrow, I will be canning beans and looking for some folks who like okra.

Back porch genealogy - August 2, 2017

I don't really have anything much to report today - nothing informative and quite possibly even nothing entertaining - so you're free to just zoom right past this entry in search of something more worth your time.

Me, I'm off work for the afternoon.  I suppose there are loads of productive things I could be doing in the two hours between now and time to start supper, but I don't want to do any of them.  For example, I could be trying to figure out how to change Gloria's cranking thing - I've already bought the part - so that I could use her to till up the cucumber row (when it gets dry enough to work) so that I can plant another round of cucumbers before it's too late for them to make before frost.  But I don't want to.  Not today.

Or, I could be -

No, I'm not making that list, for fear I'll shame myself into wasting this lovely afternoon doing something useful.  I'd rather sit here and watch this hummingbird as he tries to get nectar from the still-closed four-o'-clocks beside the porch.  He's got another 13 minutes to wait, judging by the clock.  As he flies away, a big black, orange, blue, and white butterfly lands on the screen and slowly waves his wings.  I'd be missing all this, if I were doing something useful.

I thought about finishing the book I'm reading, The Prince of Frogtown, by Rick Bragg.  This is the fourth book of his that I've read.  I've thoroughly enjoyed them all and hate to finish this one, hate for it to be over.  So I'll wait until bedtime, when I'll fall asleep after about 3 minutes of reading (no reflection on the reading material intended), thereby stretching it out, making it last another day or two.

I found out about Rick Bragg as a result of my genealogy research.  No, we're not kin (or, heck, maybe we are, five generations back).  My daddy's family is from Alabama, and as part of my  research, I've been reading Kindle books on Alabama history.  Rick Bragg's books probably came up on a "Folks who bought this book also bought" list.  I downloaded one of his books and got hooked. He speaks my language.  I don't know if it is the language of the South, or the language of Alabama, but I "get it."  I see my own family in his.

Rick's paternal grand-family worked in cotton mills and lived in cottages supplied by the mills.  My paternal grand-family lived in coal mining camps in Walker and St. Clair counties.  My grandfather finally got out of the mining business and took up share-cropping, some time after 1922, when my father was born in Walker Co.  The family spent a year or two share-cropping on an island in the Mississippi River, then later on various farms in the river bottom on the Tennessee side.  My grandfather ended up on the wrong side of the law and had to high-tail it back to Alabama in the early 1940s, but my daddy stayed, and met my mother, and married her when he was 22 and she was 14.  That's when his trouble started, I reckon.  ;)

Unlike Rick's father, my daddy did not drink much.  Not that he wouldn't have, if he could've gotten away with it, if it had been regularly worth the lip he would get from my mother if he were to come home with glazed eyes or even a hint of alcohol on his breath.  Only occasionally did he defy her, probably partly because he could rarely afford a pint.

Daddy was wicked smart, and although he was illiterate, he could figure out how to do most anything.  He could weld.  He could operate heavy equipment.  He could carpenter.  He could fix motors.  But he didn't want to do any of that; he'd rather go fishing.  Consequently, he'd quit a job when the fishing got right, and find him another one whenever the fish quit biting or times got too tight or he got sick of hearing it from my mother, whichever first occurred.  So it was that in his late 40s or early 50s, after a long stint of unemployment, he was able to get on with a millwright union, and finally began to make enough money to afford hamburger meat in his spaghetti and a pint of whiskey (which my mother would always pour onto the ground if she found it) under his truck seat.

I well remember Daddy's last "toot."

One Friday night, payday, he didn't come home at the usual hour.  By the time he was 30 minutes late, my mother was fuming; he was out loafing, was probably getting drunk, would lose his whole paycheck (which he would've cashed at the liquor store on the way home), would hit a tree, etc.  Sure enough, he didn't come home until almost daybreak, and he was drunk as Cooter Brown.  She went outside - I was right behind her - and found him in his puke-splattered work truck, half passed-out behind the wheel.

Man, oh, man, was she mad.

She yanked open the truck the truck door and, as soon as she found out he wasn't dead, tried to shove him over so she could snatch his wallet out of the back pocket of his overalls.  He resisted, as best he could, and told her to go to hell.  She rang his jaws for cussing her, and probably because she was so mad, and took the wallet, anyway.  Thank God, most of the money was still there.  Next, she snatched the keys out of the ignition and slammed the truck door so hard I thought all the windows would shatter.  She marched me back in the house, and woke up my sister, and said for us to get ready, we were going to town.  She drove straight to Stepherson's furniture store and bought a new living room suite AND a new maple kitchen table and six matching chairs, probably she first brand-new furniture she'd ever owned.

He was still sitting in the truck, his head tipped against the back glass, when we left for town in our ragged old car.

So, yeah, I get where Bragg is coming from.

I tried to e-mail him one time, through his publisher, to talk to him about a phrase I'd read in one of his books.  Regrettably, the email I received in return was from his publisher, telling me to mail him a letter c/o somewhere or another.  That was too much effort for such unimportant communication, and I let it slide.

In case he googles himself and runs across this, I'll quench his curiosity and tell him that the phrase was "if the creeks don't rise," used in the concept of a hindrance.  It is a wonderful phrase, I think, doused with history.  These days, rising waters don't routinely hinder us, but in olden days, they did.  The concept matches perfectly with the phrase, when used in that sense. 

But I learned something about the phrase when I was touring the Constitution Village in Huntsville, Alabama, a couple of years ago.  The bonnet-clad young lady who was leading the tour told us, as an aside, that the phrase "if the creeks don't rise" originally referred to the Creek Tribe, not bodies of water.  You could've knocked me over with a feather.  That put a whole new twist on the concept of hindrance!

From the back porch - 7/16/17

If someone had told me yesterday morning how tired I would be come nightfall, I might have just turned around and gone back to bed.

The first couple hours of the day proceeded as usual.  I got up, drank some coffee, cooked breakfast.  Around 10 a.m., The Grandson called, wanting to come over for the weekend.  No biggie; he's a good kid; we like him. 

Shortly after his dad brought him over, I started thinking about school starting soon, and how all of the grandchildren would be needing school supplies.  I got online, found all of the lists (high school, 7th grade, 5th grade, 2nd grade), and The Grandson and I headed to town to get the things on the lists.

Now, it's been a while since I've dealt with this sort of thing, and I was a bit shocked by the extent of these school supply lists.  When I was in school, if you had a three-ring notebook full of paper and a #2 pencil, you were good to go.  But these lists...!  Dry erase markers.  Spiral notebooks for every subject.  Composition notebooks.  Whole boxes of pencils.  Folders, with prongs and without.  Page protectors.  Glue sticks.  Highlighters.  School boxes.  Pencil pouches with metal rings and clear fronts.  Two of this, five of that.  Geez!  My shopping cart ranneth over, $200 worth of pencils, papers, and markers!

On the way home, The Grandson and I whipped through a hot-&-ready pizza joint.  When we got home, The Husband was on the back porch, sizing up the door frame for the new, snake-proof door we'd bought last weekend.  The first thing he said was, "I think it's the wrong size."  The opening is 36" wide.  We'd bought a 32" door, which came with a metal frame, part of which is welded onto the door, itself.  The hardware store man said it was perfect, if we'd also install something called a "brick ledge" that was supposed to create the right size frame on which to install the metal door.  It wasn't happening.  We tried adding lumber to the frame, but nothing we did made it okay.  And even if we had installed the door, there was a 1/2" crack between the welded-on door frame and the actual door.  Why, a big python could squeeze through that!  We decided to return the door to the store and get a regular 36" screen door.  Getting the metal door back into the packaging it came in was an ordeal by itself.  (Bear in mind that it was humid and about 167 degrees outside.)  We were both drenched with sweat by the time we loaded the metal door into the truck.

Since early spring, my to-do list has included washing off the back porch and water-sealing the wood.  We bought the water seal last summer but never applied it (the instructions said to wait a while to seal treated lumber).  In my mind, this is the year to do it, especially since the recent snake slaughter had left bad voodoo snake blood stains on the floor.  So while The Husband went to return the door, I started moving the furniture off the back porch so that I could clean the floor and the rails.  This porch is 16' x 20', and FULL of furniture and loads of crap that shouldn't even be out here.  Unloading it took a while.  The high-powered nozzle that fits on the end of the water hose did a great job of taking out the dust, pollen, and spider webs, but there were dark, moldy spots that would only come off with a scrub brush.  Once the wood was clean, I turned to the furniture, itself, to remove the spider webs and dust bunnies from under the tables and chairs.  Then it all had to be moved back to the porch.

I'd just about finished the porch when The Husband came back with the new door.  Soon after that, The 3 Granddaughters arrived, tired and hungry and wet from an afternoon of swimming.  (Their parents had come over to help install the new door.)  Since they were here, it seemed practical to sort out the mountain of school supplies in my living room and send them home with the children.  We all sat down amongst the pile and called off the items on everyone's list.  To my disappointment, I'd bought the wrong kind of notebooks and not enough crayons and markers.  *sigh* 

8 p.m. - The girls have gone home.  The Husband and I are exhausted and hungry, and we stink, and there's nothing in the house to eat that doesn't require serious cooking.  When I floated the idea of fast-food burgers, The Husband and The Grandson seconded and thirded the motion.  The Grandson and I went to town and got them at the drive-thru window (I was still way too stinky to go inside).  We gobbled them down the minute we got home.

9:30 p.m. - I'm finally clean.  But I am done - D-O-N-E done, I tell you - for the day.  It took me about an hour to rest up enough to go to bed.

I think today will be a lazy day.  There's still some work to be done on the back porch - tools need to be put away, and a little more straightening-up is in order.  But it's still hot and humid, and there's a movie that The Grandson wants to see.  An afternoon in a cool movie theatre sounds just right.

Snake 3 and Pest Removal

Okay, clearly, the wildlife in our yard is plotting to kill us.

Monday evening, The Husband was sitting in the living room, watching tv, when he saw something move outside the window.  Upon closer inspection, he found this:

The very idea, peering in our windows like that.  (Actually, it was probably aiming for the bird nest in the box on the window.)

The Husband went all samurai warrior on it.

The next day, I went to the garden center and bought TWO giant bottles of Snake Stopper. 

* * * * * * * *

I have been on a mission to make enough compost to make a difference in the garden.  Earlier in the week, I was dumping table scraps into the compost barrel and got stung by a wasp (or something).  Whatever it was, it was badass.  My hand swelled up until it looked pretty much like a blown-up latex glove.  And ITCH....  Mercy.

I went out to the barrel yesterday afternoon armed with a can of wasp spray - the kind that jets about 20 feet.  A sassafras sapling has come up through the frame, impairing access to that side of the frame, but I could get to the other side, so I filled it up with wasp foam, then ran my butt back into the house before a wasp could get me.  The Husband worked on it again tonight and thinks he found where they were hiding, and he thinks he got them.  I'm going to go out there tomorrow and dose it again for good measure.

* * * * *

Yesterday I went to the garden to pick squash and noticed that the tomato plants are firing up with blight.  I know that the best remedy for blight is to prevent it by spraying a fungicide before the blight takes hold.  But, dang it, it has rained and rained and rained here, and anything I sprayed would have washed right off.  And now it's about 100 degrees, and as humid as a swamp.  Heat + moisture = blight. 

To frost the cake, I found aphids on some of the tomatoes AND on the purple hull peas. 

I went to the garden shed for the chemicals.  I don't like chemicals, and so I try to use as them as little as possible.  But at this point it's either use them or lose the plants. 

Don't think I wasn't tempted by the latter option. 

Nevertheless, I got out the sprayer, mixed up the foul stuff, and started to spray.  I got a few seconds of good, fine mist, then the nozzle started to sputter and dribble.  I tried to work on it, wound up getting a fungicide/pesticide bath, but not a better spray.  Nanny went to the shop and got out a brand new sprayer - brand new in the sense that it had never been used, but it had been sitting in a box in the hot shop for about 5 years - but it wouldn't hold air around the pumper, wouldn't not build up pressure, and would not spray.  I tried swapping nozzles and hoses.  Nothing worked.  I put it all back in the shed, went BACK to the garden center today, and bought another sprayer.  It worked for about 2 minutes before it started spewing 3 streams instead of a spray.

Why do these things never work right? 

Would the world beat a path to my door if I built a better sprayer nozzle?

* * * * * * *

While I was in the garden tonight, The Husband sprinkled the snake repellent all around the house and along the edge of the woods.  He said he left an "exit hole" where he didn't sprinkle it, so that any snake that might be in the yard can GET THE HELL OUT.  Tomorrow, we'll close the gap.  I think it's supposed to rain again this weekend, so we'll probably have to do it again when the rain goes away.  It makes our yard smell like a giant Red Hot candy.  Kind of pleasant, actually!

From the back porch - July 10, 2017.

Three days since the last snake incident, and I am almost comfortable sitting on the piazza without a pistol in my lap.  We figure that Mr. Snake must have come through the hole in the screen door.  It's a big hole - actually just a place where the screen has come loose from the frame.  We've repaired it several times, already, but it keeps coming loose.  Probably that snake actually LIVED behind that cabinet and kept battering holes in the screen door with his head so he could get in and out when he needed to.

Okay, maybe not.

Anyway....

We loaded up and went to the hardware store, and bought ourselves a new screen door.  It is the Fort Knox of screen doors.  The frame is metal - no more warping, hopefully - and so is the screen.  It has a hydraulic thing that will make it whoooooosh closed instead of SLAMming closed, which will make The Husband happy.

I might kind of miss the slam.

But I won't miss the snakes.

The last time I checked the garden (Friday afternoon, prior to the snake-fest), it was drowning.  The tomatoes and peppers are just limp.  Green beans growing, but not blooming.  Purple hull peas beginning to bloom.  I picked a sack full of crookneck squash and three big zucchini (dang, those things grew in three days!) and a good many cucumbers.  Nanny took some of the squash, and I headed up the driveway with three grocery bags full of vegetables, wondering what I was going to do with it all.  I gave the squash and cucumbers to a neighbor who happened to be out in the yard.  I brought the zucchini home and eventually made bread with it.

I should've kept the cucumbers.  We need pickles.

I bet I know where I can get more.  ;)

ANOTHER SNAKE!

Tonight, just as I was about to get ready for bed, I went out on the back porch to get something from the table where I've been working all day.  It was dark, but there was a flashlight on the counter outside the door.  I grabbed the flashlight, switched it on, and aimed it at the counter just in time to see a SNAKE slither over a basket full of craft supplies, heading toward the crack between the back  of the cabinet and the wall.

I leapt to the other side of the porch and started screaming for The Husband.  "COME HERE!  AND BRING A GUN!"

He came running out the back door.  "What?  What is it?"

 "SNAKE!  BIG snake!"

 "WHERE?"

 "On the - on the THING."

 "WHAT THING?" 

 I could not think of the word "cabinet."   I aimed the flashlight at it the counter near him.  "ON
THAT!"

He jumped back in the house.  "WHERE?"

"I DON'T KNOW!" 

 Mayham ensued.

"Turn on the ceiling fan light," The Husband said.  When I did, he grabbed the broom and started shoving stuff around on the countertop.  The snake was gone. 

A gone snake is about worse than a present snake, when you don't know where it went. 

I came in the house and put on my gardening boots.

We moved everything off the cabinet, shined the flashlight beam down the crack.  Didn't see the snake.  We opened the cabinet doors, didn't see the snake.  I started moving porch furniture so that we could pull all of the furniture away from the wall. 

Then, The Husband, who was still shining the light behind the cabinet, said, "I see his head."

A wave of relief washed over me at knowing where he was.  But then I asked, "NOW what?" 

There were three BB guns and a bottle of BBs on top of another cabinet farther down the wall.  The Husband started shaking BB guns to see if one was loaded.  When one rattled, he brought it around to the end of the cabinet.  "Hold the flashlight!" he said.  He cocked the BB gun, and went to shooting down the crack.  BBs were ricocheting all over the place. 

 "YOU CAN'T KILL A SNAKE WITH A BB GUN!" I yelled, holding the light, dodging bullets.

 "YES, YOU CAN!" he said, and kept on shooting.

He made the snake mad enough that it eventually came out to escape the onslaught.  He kept shooting.  He emptied all the BB guns, reloaded, kept shooting.  He must have put 50 BBs in that snake's head, and 150 more in its body. 

Finally, we deemed it no longer fit for combat. 

I went to the shed for a hoe and a rake, and we dragged the thing out and put it in a sack and flung it down the hill.  Washed the blood off the porch.  Moved the furniture back into place. 

As we came inside, I said to The Husband, "THAT's a way to wind down a peaceful evening, huh?"

He said, "For real.  I need another shower.  My *ss feels kinda swampy now."

While I piddled around in the kitchen, he looked up snakes on the internet.  He thinks it was a rat snake.  I was sure it was a copperhead, or maybe a python.  ;)  Sucker was at least 3 feet long.

It'll take me 2 hours to calm down enough to sleep.

And far longer than that to sit comfortably on the back porch with my feet under the table.

UPDATE:  The snake must have landed belly-up, for it began to rain about 30 minutes after The Husband pitched it over the hill.  He may have to go find it, for we've had enough rain for a while. 

SNAKE!

This weekend was . . . eventful . . . in a not-so-great sort of way.

It started out with a backed-up sink. 

Our kitchen sink has been draining slowly for the past week, and finally stopped draining altogether Thursday night.  We plunged and plunged and poured hot water.  Nothing.  Friday I came home from the hardware store armed with a new plunger and a bottle of some sure 'nough drain cleaner, "Guaranteed to Work."  We let it soak all night Friday night, but there was still water in the sink come Saturday morning.  I went back to the hardware store, bought ANOTHER new plunger, one that pumps like a bicycle tire pump, a drain snake, and another bottle of drain cleaner (should've taken the old bottle back, instead).  I will spare you the details of why there was water running from UNDER the sink an hour after we put the new equipment to work, but it had to do with both the plunger and the snake, which became irretrievably hung deep within the drain pipes.  I made a third trip to the hardware store for replacement pipes.  We ended up calling a plumber, anyway.  Miraculously, we found one who would come on a Saturday afternoon. 

While we were waiting on the plumber, I took the "compost tea" to the garden.  I'd made 5 gallons of "tea" in a 2-gallon bucket (one uses what is at hand), figuring I could just dilute it before applying it, which I did.  I gave all of the tomatoes a good dose and spread the left-over silt around the puniest plants.  The squash needed picking, so I did that, and also grabbed a few cucumbers to soak with onions in vinegar, a summer favorite in this house.  When the plumber finally finished re-assembling the entire plumbing system under the sink (I kid you not), I cleaned up the kitchen, put the sopping towels in the washer, and spent the rest of the afternoon catching up on some computer work.

Yesterday was quiet.  After breakfast, I took my laptop out to the piazza and spent most of the day digitizing and test-sewing and uploading new embroidery designs.  (Shameless plug: https://www.etsy.com/shop/sfancy?ref=shop_sugg ) Around lunch time, when my tummy got to rumbling, I recognized a hankerin' for meat loaf and decided to make one for supper.  I stirred it up and put it in the refrigerator, thinking I'd put it in the oven around 5.

I like creamed potatoes with meat loaf, but my potatoes were getting puckered and sprout-y, so I had to come up with some side dish alternatives.  There was a bag of dried Ford Hook butterbeans in the pantry.  I'd given Cousin Roger the squash I'd picked the day before, but I'd left some growing, and if Nanny hadn't already picked them, there should be enough for our supper.  Butterbeans and sautéed squash and meatloaf and cucumbers with onions soaked in vinegar.  Sounded good to me!  I put the beans on to soak and asked The Husband if he would go to the garden and get us some squash around 5.  He said he would.  I went back to my digitizing.

By five o'clock, I'd decided that I'd go get the squash, myself.  My neck was stiff, and I needed to move after sitting most of the day.  So, picking sack in hand, to the garden I went.  Nanny saw me go past the window and came out to the porch to say hello.  She said she'd take a few squash, if we had enough to go around.  I said I'd bring her some.  She went back in the house.  I headed for the zucchini.

When I bent over to raise the first zucchini leaf, a black, 3-foot-long, hoe-handle-thick snake shot out from under it.  I hollered, "OH!" and jumped back.  It's amazing how quickly stiff joints can un-stiffen in certain situations.  Mercifully, the snake had headed AWAY from me instead of TOWARD me, but it still took a few minutes before my heart resumed its normal beat. 

Between the zucchini and the yellow crooknecks, there was enough little squash for our dinner and Nanny's.  I brought ours home and sautéed it with onions in olive oil until it was caramelized and sweet.  Man, it was good. 

But, next time, I'm sending The Husband to get the squash.  ;)

Test Two

I re-did the soil test, fearing we'd read the first test wrong.  Sure enough, we had.  Ph was okay, but the fertility was too low.   I did some research and concluded that my problem might also be fungal.  Or it could be too much rain. 

Not much I can do about the rain.

Got liquid copper fungicide AND neem oil at the store today.  Also bought some organic fertilizer that said I can soak it and make a tea to pour around the roots, and then I can spread the solids around the plants.  I've got some soaking already on the back porch.  It smells worse than a nasty butt.

Of course, it's going to rain for the next few days, which means I can't spray, yet.  I probably shouldn't pour the nasty butt water on the tomatoes, yet, but I'm going to do it, anyway.
 

Soil Test 6/29

I did a little weeding in the garden today, and found a ripening tomato deep within a vine.  I picked it and inspected it, and found that it had a squishy spot on it.  Look:

A friend suggested there might be a nutrient deficiency - calcium or potassium - in the soil.  I dug out the soil tester that I bought from a seed company and used it for the first time ever.  If the tester is to be believed, my soil is perfect, both in nutrients and Ph.

So.

Disease.  Looks like anthracnose. Or some other vile fungus.  I'll be shopping for copper fungicide tomorrow.

Birthday Month

June is birthday month in our families.  Tonight, we celebrated Nanny's birthday with a barbeque supper (with all the trimmings) and homemade strawberry shortcake.   Nanny had kids, grandkids, great-grandkids, nieces, and nephews show up to tell her "Happy Birthday!"  We had a big time.

I walked the garden with my granddaughters to see what was ripe.  We picked a batch of squash and three cucumbers.  We saw a thumb-sized purple eggplant and a bell pepper big enough to use.  Much to my consternation, the little rascals pulled up a couple of little carrots to see what was happening under the ground.  I thumped their heads for it.  ;)

But it was a joy to me to see their excitement.  They said, "Awwwww...!" when I showed them the baby cucumbers with their yellow blooms still attached.  They screamed when they grasped a cucumber to pick it and got poked by the little thorns, but they thought it was cool that the thorns just rubbed right off.  They ran to show the cucumbers to their uncle, who loves cucumbers.  He took out his pocket knife, peeled it, and ate it on the spot. 

The green beans aren't blooming yet, but they've climbed the fence and are reaching for the sky.  The tomato plants look good, but the crop has been disappointing so far.  We've had a lot of rain these past two weeks, and the fruit that was ripening when the rain started turned into yucky water bags.  Seems like I've had this problem before when it rained a lot.  I probably ought to look up tomato diseases.

We've picked a couple of batches of squash from the older plants, and they are loaded with blooms.  The younger batch of plants is growing well, but isn't blooming yet.

Purple hull peas are coming along.  The "skips" that I replanted came up fairly well and are growing. 

Something's eating the okra, but not too badly.  I'm going to leave it be, for now.

I saw a little wad of Japanese beetles on my green beans.  I'm not sure they were interested in eating, as they appeared to be mating.  In any case, I knocked them to the ground and stepped on them.  It was sort of gratifying. 

Garden Chores - June 17

Fertilized tomatoes, squash, cucumers, and peppers.

Put cages around tomatoes.

Saw the first squash bugs today.  Smashed (squashed?) the ones I could find and destroyed all the eggs I saw.  Sprayed liquid Sevin to get the ones I missed.

Watered everything but the peas.

Chopped grass.

Wore myself AND The Husband plumb out.

Two tomatoes are almost ripe.  I saw two cigar-sized zucchini and some little thumb-sized squash.  We'll be eating them before the week is out, I bet.

Supper Surprise

One of the most-served meals in my house is a dish called "Supper Surprise."  It earned its name thirty-some-odd years ago, when our oldest son, then a toddler, tore all of the labels off the canned goods in the cabinet.   Think we're having green beans for supper?  Surprise!  It's corn.

One makes do.

Over the years, Supper Surprise has evolved.  Sometimes it starts with a recipe (any old recipe will do, actually, because you're not going to make it like it says, anyway).   Eliminate all the things you don't like or don't have, and add what you do like/have.  Throw in a little bit of something you once had, and liked.  Top it with a whole bunch of grated cheese.  Sometimes, it turns out okay.

We've just come home from a camping trip.  We had breakfast at the campsite early this morning and then spent six hours on the road with only one stop to potty.  By the time we unloaded the camper and showered off the sweat, we were starving, but there were "slim pickin's" in the refrigerator.  I figured we'd go get a pizza later (when you live in the boonies, they don't bring the pizza to you); meanwhile, I sat down to catch up on e-mail and see what folks had been doing on Facebook.  Someone had posted this recipe: 

http://www.bunsinmyoven.com/2015/03/08/sloppy-joe-cornbread-bake/

Sloppy Joe Cornbread:

1 box of Jiffy cornbread mix
1/3 cup milk
1 egg
1 cup cheddar cheese, divided
1 can of cream style corn
I pound of ground beef
1 jar of sloppy joe sauce
Small diced onion
1 diced bell pepper
Green onion blades, chopped, for garnish

Man, that looked good to me. 

I read the ingredient list and figured I could come up with something close.  I knew I had eggs and milk.  Sure enough, there was a box of Jiffy cornbread mix in the pantry.  I figured I could come up with most everything else but the sloppy joe sauce - but, hey, there might even be an old can of Manwich way back in the cabinet.  I didn't have a bell pepper, but I wouldn't have put one in if I'd had it (though I might have used a jalapeno if there'd been one in the vegetable drawer).  I saved the recipe on my Kindle and headed for the kitchen.

Eggs, milk, Jiffy, onion - check. 

Got green onions in the flower bed - check.  (Garnish is a very important component of Supper Surprise.)

Cheese - hmm, no cheddar.  We had individually-wrapped American slices, a couple of pepper jack slices that were dried around the edges, 2 half blocks of Velveeta (what IS that stuff, anyway?) in both colors (yellow and white), a wedge of parmesan, and a little chunk of some crumbly, flavorful stuff called "MontAmore." 

No corn, cream style or otherwise. 
No ground beef, but a half of a roll of pork breakfast sausage. 
No sloppy joe sauce, no Manwich.  But, look!  A can of chili beans and a can of tomato sauce. 

Close enough. 

I dumped the Jiffy into a bowl, broke an egg in it, measured out the milk (sort of).  Grated the MontAmore into the bowl, and began to stir it all up.  There was a bug in the Jiffy.  I hesitated only an instant before I dug the bug out and kept stirring.  More bugs came to the top.  Now, two bugs is usually my limit (I would prefer one, for who knows what two bugs might have gotten up to in the box), but I was hungry, so I kept stirring and digging.  I called it quits at five bugs and some unidentified specks.  I knew I had corn meal mix in a canister.  I'd just start over. 

But I had already put in the good cheese.

I put the whole mixture into a collander and washed the Jiffy off the cheese.   Some of the cheese went down the drain with the Jiffy, but I stirred what was left into a fresh batch of bug-free cornbread batter.  Gave it a healthy squirt of honey to sweeten it.  Boom.  Done.

The recipe said to cook the cornbread a little bit, then put the meat/sauce mixture on top, but this thing was turning into a cornpone/chili casserole in which the chili goes under the bottom.  So I fried the sausage until it was thawed, added a chopped onion, and cooked it until the sausage wasn't pink anymore.  Added a can of chili beans and about a half a can of tomato sauce.  Sprinkled some chili powder and garlic in it.  A little salt, a little pepper, and into the casserole dish it went.  Since it was a little light on cheese, I laid some American cheese slices on top of it, and then topped it with the cornbread batter, which by that time had risen and was foamy and thick.  I smeared it on top of the meat mixture as best I could, and baked it in a 400 degree oven for 20 minutes.  Lovingly added the green onion garnish after it had cooled a minute.

Looks good, huh?

I dug in.  The cornbread had soaked up almost every drop of the good juice.  I think there might've been a little too much cornbread, anyway, and it was too thick, and I think I should have baked it, first, and spooned the meat/sauce on top like the recipe suggested.  

Nevertheless, that Sloppy Joe Cornbread recipe is a keeper.  ;)

From the Piazza - June 9, 2017

Apparently, committing planned actions to print works in favor of planned actions getting done, for after my last post, I went to the garden and planted the tomatoes, did some weeding, and fertilized everything but the beans, like I said I ought to do.

Today, I'm going to say that I ought to get the purple hull peas re-planted (again) before the day is over (that was the one task on my previous list that did not get done), setting myself both a task and a time limit.

I do tend to put things off.  :-\



 

From the Piazza - June 7

The wrens that occupied the (supposedly) see-through bird house on my living room window have raised one crop of babies this year and are back (at least I assume it's the same ones) for Round 2.  I say "supposedly" because the see-through function doesn't work for wrens.  They build orb-shaped nests, with side entrances.  They have effectively built a privacy fence between them and my window, and I can't see what's going on inside the nest, dang it. 

I did not know that birds raise more than one set of babies per season, but there is new chirping going on in the bird house, multiple voices, though not as many as before.  Watching the two parents taking turns zooming in with bugs in their beaks, I wonder how they can keep straight which kids have been fed. 




I should be working in the garden instead of writing about it.  It is an absolutely gorgeous day - sunny, but not too hot and not too humid, and a nice breeze - perfect for gardening.  Also perfect for sitting on the piazza, drinking tea and blogging.  After supper, or maybe before, I'm going to make myself get up and plant the six tomato plants that have lived on my front porch for a week, if the ground is not too wet. 

The peas I re-planted on two weeks ago are up, but only half of each row sprouted.  The north end of the garden is low, and stands in water long after the rest of the garden has dried.  Leaving the middles unplowed seems to have sped up the drying time, but not enough to save the seeds from drowning.  I need about a dump-truck full of good dirt to level up that end of the garden, but it would probably wash away without a retainer wall to hold it.

If the ground is not too wet, I may replant the peas.  Again. 

The fertilizing I did on May 23 seems to have helped the tomatoes.  They look greener and less pissed-off.  They are beginning to bear (we could have a mess of fried green tomatoes for supper if I were willing to sacrifice a shorter wait for a home-grown tomato & mayonnaise sandwich).  I should probably fertilizer them again this evening. 

Dang, it appears that the longer I sit here, the more work I'll think up.  I should go, before my to-do list gets any longer!

May 26 - Re-planting

The sky was overcast this afternoon, and the temperature was mild, and the wind was blowing, just right for working outside, and so I got my lazy butt up and went to work in the garden with the hoe.  If Mother Nature would accommodate me with one such day every week, I believe I could raise a pretty good garden.

I re-planted a few skips in the pole beans and okra, and put some hyacinth bean vine seeds in the ground beside every fence post.  I soaked the bean vine seeds for only a few minutes before I planted them (I think you're supposed to soak them overnight),  but it's supposed to rain tomorrow, so maybe they'll get soaked some more.  I may regret planting those with the cucumbers and the beans; if they come up, they will fight for territory on the fence.  But if they win, won't they be pretty?

I meant to plant more squash on the one empty row at the back of the garden, but I smooth forgot to do it, and I've already cleaned the dirt from under my fingernails, so it's not happening today.

May 23 - Fertilizing and such

My garden looks puny.

Last week, the farmer sprayed the fields with Round-Up, and it evidently drifted toward the garden, for many of my plants have white spots on their leaves.  Every year when the Round-Up gets sprayed, the wild cherry tree near the garden drops its leaves. So do the crape myrtles in front of Nanny's house.  But the little pin oaks and big pines nearer to the field don't seem to mind.

I get so frustrated on my drive to and from work, watching other people's gardens grow.  Their tomatoes are big and green and look healthy.  My tomato plants are scrawny and a putrid shade of green.  The biggest squash plants are only about 2" tall. 

The pole beans sprouted fairly well and are about 6" tall.  There are a few skips that could stand re-planting.  The purple hull peas didn't come up at all.  Maybe I used old seeds.  In any case, I plowed up the pea rows and Nanny re-planted them with a different batch of seeds.

I mixed up 15 gallons of Miracle Grow water and poured it directly onto the pepper, tomato, and squash plants.  I also made a drill beside the pole beans, sprinkled some 6-12-12 in it, and covered it up with dirt.  It might rain tonight, so maybe the fertilizer will melt. 

I still have one empty row.  I plowed it again today to keep the grass from taking it over, and I want to put something in it.  It is on the back side of the garden, which gets less sun.  I probably should have put the squash back there, and next year I probably will, if I can remember.  Or maybe I should do it tomorrow, if it doesn't rain!

Gloria, the red tiller, gave me a little trouble today.  I wanted to use her to weed and loosen the dirt around the tomato plants.  Her rope was hanging out again, and would not accommodate a good yank.  I gave it about a hundred little yanks and a moderately severe cussing, and she eventually fired off.  As I was tilling around one of the tomato plants, I turned loose of Gloria so that I could gather up some Bermuda grass roots, and when I reached for her, she was gone!  I looked up, and she was slowwwwly walking over to the next row, headed straight for a tomato plant.  I grabbed her before she did any damage and didn't turn her loose again until I was finished!  Later, when I wanted to use her around the green beans, her cord was hanging out again, and I couldn't get her to even wheeze. 

I should google what to do when your cord hangs out.



  

I hate lawnmowers

The Husband said he was going to leave work early today so that he could mow our yard and Nanny's yard 'fore it rains.  Sure enough, when I got home, his truck was down at Nanny's, and he was already finished with her front yard and was starting on the back yard by the time I got down there. 

I waved at him and walked out to the garden to check the progress.  Things are sprouting, but not vigorously.  A little rain to soften the dirt wouldn't hurt.  There was grass coming up amongst the tomatoes, so I grabbed a hoe, sharpened it on the bench grinder, and did some chopping.  I was just putting away my hoe when I heard the riding lawnmower screech and go

WHOOOOOMMMMMPPP.

Uh-oh.

I listened.  The motor was running, but the blades weren't turning.

We bought this lawnmower, a Cub Cadet, 10 days ago.  The day we brought it home, the blade bent before we finished the first yard.  The store gave us a new blade, which seemed a little sturdier than the factory blade.  That new blade bent today.

Now, I was against buying another Cub Cadet.  We have a zero-turn model that we bought several years ago, and it has consistently been the most persnickety lawnmower we have ever owned.  The belt will come off it you look at it side-ways, and it did come off, almost every single time I tried to mow.  When we took it out for the first time this year, something went beserk, and it wouldn't turn or stop moving - he had to turn off the key to keep from running into the shed.  It's motor is in the back and has no hole for a hitch, so we can't pull the lawn sweeper with it.  I do not have one good thing to say about this lawnmower, and I was not gung-ho about buying another one of the same brand.

So, when I heard the new lawnmower roll into the shop and saw that part of the yard had not been mowed, I followed the mower into the shop and gave The Husband a look that asked, "Is this lawnmower screwed up again?"  And he was climbing off, disparaging the lawnmower's parentage through gritted teeth.

I thought it best not to comment.  I came on back to the house to prep supper.  ;)

The dish I made for supper calls for fresh tarragon, and as I was stripping the leaves off of the stems, I remembered seeing a stem-stripping tool for sale in a cookware catalog yesterday.  I didn't look it over very closely to see how it works because I thought, "Really?  We need a DEVICE to pick thyme leaves off the stem?" 



How lazy have we gotten?  It seems to me to be a whole lot more trouble to (1) find the leaf-picker-offer in the tool drawer, (2) use it, (3) wash it, (4) dry it, and (5) put it back in the drawer than to run my fingers down the thyme stem and be done with it.

Besides, I like to lay hands on my food.  Sometimes, that's the only way to tell when things are right.  My high-school home ec teacher almost had a come-apart when she caught me with my hand in the biscuit dough.  How else was I supposed tell if it needed more milk???  I only used that confounded pastry cutter she handed me until she turned her back. 

The Husband must have worked on the mower, for I hear it circling our yard, blades running.

Time to get cooking!

Squirrel Tree Frog

A couple of weeks ago, we were in our living room, watching TV and chilling, when something BIG climbed up the wall across the room from me.  I screamed like a girl and jerked my feet onto the couch.  It nearly scared The Husband to death, and he jumped out of his recliner hollering, "What?!"  I pointed to the wall and squealed, "There's a HUGE spider climbing up the wall!"  He turned to look, and I heard him gasp.  I was already scanning the floor, looking for a shoe, a plastic sword, anything to hit it with when I heard him say, "It's a TREE FROG!"  A wave of relief washed over me.  I said, "Well, catch it and pitch it outside," which he did.

That frog was brown, the color of dark ale, almost as dark as the wood of our living room floor.  I did not know that there were brown frogs that were capable of walking up a wall.

The next day when I came home from work, there was a frog stuck to the porch wall above our front door.  This frog was the color of sand, almost the identical color of the wall.

Hmmm...could it be...?

I told The Husband about it when he came home from work.  We went outside and found him in the same spot, almost invisible against the wall.  We both pondered whether a frog could change colors, like a chameleon, for neither of us had ever seen a brown frog OR a tan frog that could climb a wall.

Tonight, the subject of tree frogs came up during my granddaughter's softball game.  I told Mr. Bob, a retired Navy man, about my theory of color-changing tree frogs.  He scoffed.  I said, "Well, let's google it," and I whipped out my phone and found this:

That, friend, is a Hyla Squirella, also known as a Squirrel Tree Frog.  This little critter can change colors.

Mr. Bob was stunned, and asked about the frog's habitat, as if he suspected it only existed in a jungle, or something.  The article I read said it's habitat is the southeastern United States, from Texas up to Virginia.  I felt vindicated.  Later, at home, I looked at the map that accompanies the article, and it shows the frog living far south and east of west Tennessee.

But, I promise you, one lives in my yard.

May 15 - Garden Check

Stuff is coming up.

It took the squash and zucchini about 4 days to send up the first sprouts.  Green beans, cucumbers, and okra began to sprout today, day 7. 

There are deer tracks everywhere.  The deer are coming up from the little thicket behind the garden, and walking diagonally across the garden to the field beside Nanny's house.  I think it's a fairly well-established route.  I wish I could've seen them come across there the first night after we installed the hog-wire fence for the beans.  Judging by the mish-mash of tracks in one spot, I'd say the fence surprised 'em.   

....Which makes me recall....

A long time ago, we had a big old shaggy brown dog named Bear.  He looked like a cross between a Golden Retriever and a German Shepherd - long, thick, tan coat with a black muzzle - (how that happened I'll never know, for his mother was a Sharpei and his daddy was a brown and gray patchwork shepherd dog from up the road that we affectionately referred to as "Fugly").  Bear chased anything that moved, including meter readers (how they hated him) - I guess that was the shepherd in him - and he was fast as lightning.  Let him see a squirrel or rabbit, and ZOOM!  Zero to sixty in one second.

He routinely zoomed right through the flowers that I'd planted around the patio.  There was no way to teach him any different.  I'd parked the car on his head when he was a puppy, and he never was quite right.  So I figured the best thing would be to put up a fence around the patio.  We didn't have much money, so the best I could do was chicken wire and some landscape timbers, sawn in half and planted like posts.  I started the fence late on a Saturday afternoon.  We had somewhere to go that night, and so I didn't get much done before it was time to quit for the day.  I got the posts set in the ground on one side of the patio, and had just enough time to tack up some chicken wire between the posts when I had to stop. 

The next morning, I went out to the patio, and my posts were leaning, and the chicken wire was all pooched out in one spot.  As I stood there puzzling about what could have happened, Bear came trotting around the house and sauntered toward me.  The pooched-out spot in the chicken wire was exactly as high as his head.  Judging by the amount of damage, I'd say he'd been moving at a pretty good clip when he encountered the newly-installed chicken wire in the darkness.  Is it wrong of me to still be snickering about it?  ;)

May 9 - Green Beans, Cucumbers, Okra, Peas

My planets must have been in alignment today, for I was able to accomplish all of my garden chores  without too many complications.

The plan:  (1) build a permanent fence for climbers, and (2) plant beans and cucumbers to grow on it. 

My boss turned me loose early today.  The weather was great.  I had a pile of fence posts and rusty hog wire left over from prior attempts.  I had a roll of bailing wire to attach the wire to the posts.  I actually found the fence-post-pounder and the wire cutters.  I was in business.  In less than an hour, I had ten fence posts pounded into the ground and one long section of hogwire attached.  It was at that point that I remembered that I'd wanted to re-till that row before I planted, since it was a little clumpy from being too wet when I'd plowed it the day before. 

I hauled Gloria, the little red tiller, out of the shed, thinking I'd run her up one side of the fence and down the other.  She hadn't been cranked this year.  When I reached for the pull cord, it was hanging out about a foot and wouldn't go back in.  With a shortened cord, it couldn't build up enough compression to start.  I was about to cuss when I saw that spot on the top of the tiller where you can use a drill and a special bit to crank the thing.  I pushed the tiller to the workshop, where the little cranking bit was supposed to be.  It wasn't there.  I did cuss then, and I yanked Gloria's cord just for spite, and the b*tch fired up, and sucked the cord back in where it was supposed to be.  I could not believe it. 

I rolled her out to the garden, and we started tilling.  I hadn't finished the first pass when I looked up, and there stood Nanny.  She hadn't been home when I started to work, and I hadn't heard her drive up.  But there she was, in her gardening clothes, ready to work.  I was glad I'd already done the hard part, and glad I hadn't finished the wiring when I realized that if I'd raise the wire a little higher off the ground, Gloria could run under it until the plants get too big.  When I finished the tilling, Nanny helped me re-attach the section I'd started and attach the next section, and we were ready to plant.

About that time, I looked up, and there stood The Husband in HIS gardening clothes. He, too, was glad I'd done the hard part.  ;)  I sent him back to the house to get the seeds while I de-clumped three more rows with the big black tiller.  He and Nanny made short work of planting the pole beans, cucumbers, and purple hull peas.  I planted okra and did a little raking while they put the tillers back in the shed. 

Yeah, we kicked butt today.

May 8 - Tomatoes, peppers, squash

Today was a perfect day, weather-wise.  As soon as I got home from work, I put on the gardening clothes and went down to Nanny's to check on the garden.  I've had a dozen tomato plants, a dozen pepper plants, and an eggplant living on my front porch for two weeks, but it's been too wet to put them in the ground.  (It is a miracle that they are still alive!)  I took them down to the garden, dragged the big tiller out of the shed, and re-plowed 5 rows of ground that was really a tad too wet for tilling.  But I had on my gardening clothes, and the weather was nice, and I had the time, so I planted the tomatoes and stuff in dirt that wasn't *quite* mud.  I also planted about 10 hills of squash and a couple of hills of zucchini.

I am trying an experiment this year.  Recalling how the Native Americans used to plant corn, squash, and beans together, I stuck a squash hill on both sides of one of the tomato plants, theorizing that maybe the squash leaves will help keep the weeds down between the tomatoes.  I'll let you know how that works out, weed-wise.

Tomorrow afternoon I hope to build a permanent fence for green beans and such.  I have all the stuff I need except The Husband's willingness to go along with the plant.  I'll let you know how that works out, too.  ;)

Kale

Last year, we set several prefab raised bed frames in the back yard.  The Grandchildren and I planted lettuce, beets, spinach, and kale in one of them.  I planted flowers in one, and vegetables in another.  We had a long wet spell that drowned  most everything, followed by a long dry spell that withered up everything else that the critters didn't eat, except for one scraggly kale plant.

That kale plant grew and was just beginning to look nice when a worm found it, and ate it right down to its skeleton.  I left it where it sat, and it leafed out again, weathered the winter, and now look at it.  It is magnificent, and far too awesome to eat (that's it at the far end). 

The front end of the bed is planted with onions and garlic.  Every one of them came out of my Blue Apron box.  We get lots of onions and garlic in the box.  I plant the root ends of the scallions as I cut them off, and if the garlic sprouts, into the bed it goes.  I haven't bought green onions in months. 
 

Good Friday 2017

It's all The Husband's fault (isn't it always?).

I was sitting on the back porch yesterday morning, playing Solitaire, drinking coffee, minding my own business, when The Husband said, "The wind isn't blowing much today.  I think I'll burn that pile of sticks."

Well.

That pile of sticks had been laying in the outskirts of the yard for TWO YEARS.  During that time, it had transformed itself from a loose, head-high mountain to a compact, knee-high heap.  It needed to go.  The Husband struck a match, and within minutes the flames were so high and hot that he had to stand back 15 feet to keep from getting roasted, himself.

Between him and me, there was an un-sprung mole trap that had been sitting, locked and loaded and idle, for a week.  When I noticed it, I decided to move it to another of the hundreds of mole tunnels that are disfiguring our yard.  As I was hunting for a better spot, I noticed all kinds of things that needed doing.  There were saplings springing up in flower beds, dead limbs that needed to be removed from the Sweet Betsy bush, and a concrete planter on a concrete pedestal that had settled into soft ground (probably the mole's doing) and needed moving.

The Husband gave me The Look when I said we ought to move the planter, but he helped me load it into a wheel barrow, one heavy piece at a time, and move it to a different spot in the yard.  Naturally, in its new location, the planter begged for flowers.  I took The Husband's truck to the garden center and came home with potting soil, flowers, herbs, seeds, blueberry bushes, and two 6-packs of tomato plants.

In retrospect - and I was retrospecting about this even as I drove home - the tomato plants were a mistake.

You see, I had not yet readied a garden spot for the tomato plants and, more importantly, we were  planning to be gone from home for a week, starting in two days; if I did not get those tomato plants in the ground before the trip, they would die of thirst in their little plastic cartons before we came back home.  Seven dollars and 99 cents' worth of plants, just gone.  Unconscionable. 

So after I planted the flowers and the herbs and the seeds and the blueberry bushes, and after The Husband and I had finished eating our fried bologna sandwiches and were resting on the back porch, I said to The Husband, "I think I'll go plow up a row in the garden for these tomato plants."

Talk about getting The Look.  While I had been puttering around the yard with shovels and loppers, he had been push-mowing the yard, and he was tired and well smoked from the fire, and was probably thinking about a shower and a lazy afternoon in front of a television. 

I said, "I saw that Look.  You don't have to help.  I've got it."  And I meant it.  For real.

I went inside, got my hat and some fresh gloves, topped off my water glass, grabbed my Jeep keys, and drove down to the garden (I knew I'd never make it back up Nanny's driveway on foot once I got through with the plowing). 

I LOVE TO RUN THAT PLOW.  For real.  I love the smell of the dirt.  I love watching those weeds being yanked from the ground.  I love pulverized soil!

I dragged the tiller out of the shed.  IT CRANKED ON THE VERY FIRST PULL. 

I thought, "This was meant to be." 

I put 'er in gear and headed for the garden, and as I tilled, the voices of my fathers spoke to me. 

It was Good Friday, and as the tiller tines bit into the dirt, I heard my Daddy say, "Thangs planted on Good Friday s'posed to come up in three days."  I fought that tiller down the row, and as I turned it around for the second pass and saw how my work was more serpentine than straight, I heard my father-in-law say, "You'c'n plant more on a crooked row."  HAH!  Those two....  :)

Anyway....

As I was coming back up the row, fighting that tiller, trying to straighten out the curves, I looked up and saw The Husband and The Grown Nephew standing at the end of the row, their arms folded across their chests, just watching.  When I got closer, The Grown Nephew had the audacity to comment (with a snaking hand sign, mind you) on the crookedness of my row.  I gave him two hand signs of my own, one of which invited him to take over the tilling.  He shook his head and waved me off, shouting he'd probably do worse. 

The Husband continued to give me The Look.

Then Nanny drove up.  She'd taken The Grown Nephew's little daughter shopping for an Easter dress.  They went inside, changed clothes, and came out to the garden.

You should have seen how fast both The Husband and The Nephew offered to take over the tilling when Nanny came out.

But thank goodness she did come out, for as I was fighting the tiller toward her, Nanny noticed that one of the tiller tires was flat.  The Husband and The Nephew sprang into action, and within minutes, I was back at work. 

It is amazing how much easier it is to steer a tiller when both of the tires are the same.  :)

I ended up tilling the whole garden - seven rows, with ample space for a riding lawnmower to go down the un-tilled middles.  My subsequent rows were straighter, thanks to the un-flat tire and my late father-in-law's whisper, "Pick you out something at the far end of the row and aim the tiller at it and your rows'll be straight."  Good advice, Pop-Pop, good advice.

The next time The Husband offered to take over the tilling, I said, "I'd rather you'd go buy me 10 bags of cow poop."  And HE DID IT.

I was working on the last row when he returned with the composted manure.  He and Nanny opened the bags and sprinkled the poo in the first few rows while I drank some water and cooled off.  Then he took on the job of running the tiller over those rows to work the manure into the soil while I rested and finished my water on the tailgate of his truck. 

All of my joints locked up in the five minutes I sat on the tailgate.  When I slid off the tailgate to plant the #)@&! tomatoes, it felt like my leg bones racked into my shoulder blades.  After planting that last #!(#% tomato, I thought I was probably going to have to sleep in the garden, as I could not get up.

Lord, have mercy on me!

And on The Husband, too!